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Baron Gamba Castle, located in Châtillon, stands on a rocky promontory in the heart of the Region.
It was built in the early XX century by Charles Maurice Gamba, the husband of Angélique d’Entrèves – Countess Christin d’Entrèves’ daughter. The original project was devised by the engineer Carlo Siroldi.

Since 1982, the castle has been owned by the Autonomous Valle d’Aosta Region of and regularly hosts many cultural events.

The Castle is surrounded by a large 125.000-acre English park designed at the beginning of the XIX century, perfectly integrated with estate buildings and the surrounding landscape. The luxuriant vegetation, painstakingly arranged on the naturally sloping stretch of land, offers magnificent sights which are impressively blended with the territory, both from the architectural and the naturalistic point of view.

Of the total area of the park, there are several lawns with beautiful bulbous plants such as daffodils (Narcissus spp.) and tulips (Tulipa spp.), woods, paths, and rock formations.

Inside the park there are almost 200 trees: beech trees (Fagus sylvatica) near the stables and the Castle, Austrian pines (Pinus nigra) including the oldest specimens of the Valley, but also firs (Abies spp.), cedars (Cedrus spp.), blue spruces (Picea pungens), Douglas firs (Pseudotsuga menziesii), Norway spruces (Picea abies), oaks (Quercus spp.), ashes (Fraxinus spp.), maidenhair trees (Ginkgo biloba), limes (Tilia spp.), horse chestnuts (Aesculus hippocastanum), Norway maples (Acer platanoides), and sycamore maple (Acer pseudoplatanus).

Several monumental trees in the park are particularly interesting: protected by a regional law, they are all easily recognizable thanks to their information tags; there’s a giant specimen of Sequoiadendron giganteum, which is now 121-ft tall with a circumference of about 7 ft. – it was planted in the park in the second half of the XIX century and it soon found its perfect habitat there. There is also a monumental bald cypress (Taxodium distichum), and a magnificent honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos).

The entire park and its vegetation are managed and safeguarded by the Regional Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources, which constantly and thoroughly monitors the quality of the natural environment.

This post is also available in: Italiano (Italian)